You Can't Stay Here Forever: A Novel

By Katherine Lin

Named a must-read book of summer by: Good Morning America, People, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Philadelphia Inquirer and one of the best books of the year by the New York Post

Desperate to obliterate her past, a young widow flees California for the French Riviera in this compelling debut, a tale of loss, rebirth, modern friendship, and romance that blends Sally Rooney’s wryness and psychological insight with Emma Straub's gorgeous scene-setting and rich relationships.

Just days after her young, handsome husband dies in a car accident, Ellie Huang discovers that he had a mistress—one of her own colleagues at a prestigious San Francisco law firm. Acting on impulse—or is it grief? rage? Probably all three—Ellie cashes in Ian’s life insurance policy for an extended stay at the luxurious Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France. Accompanying her is her free-spirited best friend, Mable Chou.

Ellie hopes that the five-star resort on the French Riviera, with its stunning clientele and floral-scented cocktails, will be a heady escape from the real world. And at first it is. She and Mable meet an intriguing couple, Fauna and Robbie, and as their poolside chats roll into wine-soaked dinners, the four become increasingly intimate. But the sunlit getaway soon turns into a reckoning for Ellie, as long-simmering tensions and uncomfortable truths swirl to the surface.

Taking the reader from San Francisco to the gilded luxury of the south of France, You Can’t Stay Here Forever is a sharply funny and exciting debut that explores the slippery nature of marriage, the push and pull between friends, and the interplay of race and privilege, seen through the eyes of a young Asian American woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9780063241442

Katherine Lin

Katherine Lin is an attorney and writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and Stanford Law School.

Book preview

Dedication

For Ben, who not only said that I could, but that I should

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

I was waiting for the J train when I found out my husband was dead. I had left work earlier than usual, and the underground Embarcadero Muni Station, which was so jammed during rush hour that it was difficult to walk down the platforms, was nearly empty. My phone had only one bar of reception, and the ringing from my phone had startled me. The screen read San Francisco, CA below the unknown number.

Mrs. Anderson? said the voice on the phone.

Yes? I said, remembering the first person who’d called me that: the bellhop at the hotel where we stayed on our honeymoon, only a few months ago. I’d been startled when he spoke. Who? I wanted to say. Who is Mrs. Anderson?

When I had told Mable how upsetting it was for me to be called Mrs. Anderson a day after the wedding, she said, What did you expect when you changed your last name? You’ve erased yourself on two fronts. As a woman and as an Asian American woman.

The train whirred past me, and I was tempted to hang up. I was impatient to get on with what I felt the night should look like: getting on the Muni, walking to the bar that almost always smelled like ammonia, having drinks with Mable, which meant getting drunk or at least earning a respectable buzz, and then somehow making my way back home.

Where are you? Are you sitting down? the man asked, letting out a small cough between the questions.

No, I said. I had been listening to music when I picked up the call, the ringing interrupting the song, and now I pressed my headphones more firmly into my ears.

Are you driving?

No. I’m sorry, who is this?

I’m afraid I have some bad news. Your husband was in a serious car accident. He’s dead. He spoke clearly and firmly, as if underlining each word twice. He gave me his name and the name of the hospital he was calling from, one I recognized from its association with a medical school. On the other end of the line, I could hear him shuffling papers, and I imagined him as a young resident, likely trained to deliver news from some mnemonic device or protocol. He began to list the names of procedures (all intended to be lifesaving, but all ultimately unsuccessful) and then repeated those words again, He’s dead. He repeated the name of the hospital and told me to come in as soon as I could. I said nothing, just hung up.

I found myself leaving the station. I could smell urine as I headed toward the stairwell to the exit, the daylight streaming ugly through the Muni street opening. A pigeon by my feet had curled up its left leg so it looked like it was dancing instead of limping. I dropped my phone at the top of the stairs and the screen shattered.

Sucks, a teenage boy said as he passed. The back of his head was dyed pink.

The phone still worked somehow, though, and I requested an Uber to the hospital. A car was just around the corner, and I felt thankful when it arrived. It was a dirty Camry whose driver grunted at me as I buckled myself in. I wondered if Ian had been wearing a seat belt when he died. The car made a few turns on local roads and then turned onto a freeway on-ramp.

Even though Ian and I were young and barely married, I had already spent at least a handful of hours wondering what it would be like to receive this kind of news. This imagining usually happened as I was curled up next to him while he slept, a mound of comforter rising and falling like a metronome. I felt I’d first deny it, swear up and down that they had the wrong Mrs. Anderson. It couldn’t be him, I’d say, I just saw him this morning. There are a million people with this last name. And then, after I’d accepted my fate, been forced to after identifying a splotchy birthmark on his hip, I would start to plan the funeral. I ran through lists of our friends, deciding whom I’d ask to speak, who would send flowers instead of attending, and who would show up but eventually disappear from my life. The images that would go through my mind were clichéd, drawing from the scenes that Mable and I made fun of in movies and television shows.

But my imagined reaction was nothing like my real one. Even though I was gutted, sickened, wanted to hurl myself out of the back seat of the moving car or curl myself into something so small it no longer existed, I didn’t question the fact of it. Two words made me so certain: car accident. Ian had always driven like a maniac. When we first started dating, I’d pretended I found it frightening, gasping whenever he cut across four lanes of highway traffic to pull off at an exit, the sounds of car horns following us. But really, I loved it. I thought it made him different from the other lawyers I’d met, whose pleated khakis created unflattering mounds and lumps where they shouldn’t be.

From the Uber, I called my mother, who picked up after two and a half rings.

Did you see Carol’s invites? she asked. I swear they used the exact same vellum we did.

He’s dead, I said. The driver caught my eye in the rearview mirror.

What? What did you say?

I repeated myself three times, then told her I was already on the way to the hospital. Even though she was in Ohio, I gave her the hospital address, too. She started crying and shouting until I said, I just got here, I have to go now.

I’m sorry, said the driver as I hung up and exited his car. Inside, a main desk receptionist directed me to an elevator in which a man lay under a thick blanket on a gurney, his eyes closed. Next to the gurney stood a doctor in a white coat who was using his thumb to scroll through a social media app on his phone, only slowing down to study pictures of someone’s vacation. There were shots of a beach, a man holding a frosted cocktail. A woman with coral red lipstick, a parrot on her arm, was midscream when another photo was taken. It was supposed to be a playful picture, but it looked frightening to me. The man on the gurney whimpered and the doctor glanced down.

Almost there, he said.

On the Emergency Department floor I spoke to someone behind a desk. She typed his name into her computer and then looked up briefly at me and back down at her keyboard. She said, Hold on, let me get someone for you. I realized then that the news of his death might’ve been hours old when it reached me. He could’ve been dead when I was eating lunch, picking shrimp tails out of my salad and laying them in a spiral on my napkin. Or this afternoon, when I’d closed my door and pretended to be on a conference call but really just texted with Mable to make plans.

The woman got up from her desk and walked down the hallway. She wore a set of pink scrubs, and on her collar there was a pin of a smiling cartoon bear holding a bunch of multicolor balloons. I saw her speaking to a group of people wearing blue and teal scrubs. When she returned, she said, It won’t be much longer.

A man standing with the group of people she had just spoken to came up to me and introduced himself as the doctor who had called me. I said, You look older than you sound.

Let me take you somewhere quieter, he said.

He led me into a small room off of the waiting area, where he had me sit down on a small couch and took a seat opposite me. He explained that my husband had arrived at the hospital after suffering serious injuries from a car accident. He once more listed all the procedures they had done. There was nothing we could do, he kept saying. The entire time he was speaking I had to stop myself from leaning across the couch and shaking him, even striking him. It seemed appalling that he could say such words to me. Instead, I asked to see Ian’s body, and the man told me he’d take me to the morgue.

As I followed him out, my phone buzzed. My mother had texted that she’d be on the next plane out to San Francisco, and sent me her flight number. Mable had sent me a string of question marks, and I realized that I hadn’t canceled our drinks date. I imagined her sitting at our table at the bar, the one equidistant between the door and the bathroom, positioned so we wouldn’t catch the cold breeze outside or have to hear the toilet flushing. She still had the luxury of not knowing. She was still on the other side.

Chapter Two

When I picked up my mom at the airport, shortly after dawn, I found her waiting by the curb. Before she spotted me in the car, I saw the flash of the silver hairbrush she always had with her as she ran it through her hair. She looked thinner than the last time I’d seen her. Next to her on the ground was a small carry-on. My mom was a supreme packer, with the ability to fit multiple outfits into what looked like an overnight bag. I could imagine the neat coils of cashmere and the sensible cottons, the socks tucked into each corner. There would be something for her to wear out to dinner at a casual restaurant, another outfit appropriate for a place that called them entrées, not main courses. I went through my mental catalogue of her closet and tried to guess what she’d chosen for the funeral.

We hugged, and I took in a deep breath. I could feel her do the same.

This is horrible, she said.

I helped her put her luggage in the trunk. She offered to drive, but I had already gotten back into the driver’s seat. As we pulled onto my street, I realized I had forgotten to close the garage door when I left for the airport. We could see it sitting empty from down the block. I pulled my car into the garage, tight against the right side of the wall, though Ian’s car wasn’t in its usual space on the left.

Inside the house my mom took off her jacket to reveal dark navy slacks with an ivory-colored sweater with visible ironing lines on the arms. She folded the jacket and laid it on a kitchen chair, then said, The kitchen looks different.

We got it painted a few months after you last visited, I said. She hadn’t been to San Francisco since May, when Ian and I had gotten married, and it was now early September.

I put the car keys on the kitchen counter and said, I’m going back to bed, if that’s all right with you.

She nodded and said, I’ve got plenty to do here. I padded to the bedroom, whose shades were drawn so that it was almost dark, and shut the door. I hadn’t been in this room since yesterday morning, when Ian was still alive. I heard the snap of latex gloves over her wrists, the spray of the cleaning bottle, the movement of picture frames and plants on the top of shelves.

For about an hour I lay in bed, trying to fall asleep, but eventually gave up and took out my phone. I opened the browser and reread the first page of results from my recent search: police report, san francisco, how long. All the links on this page were light purple, indicating that I had already opened them.

Yesterday, on my way home from the hospital, I’d called the police department’s main number and asked for details about the accident. They transferred me through to multiple departments before I reached someone who informed me that I would have to wait until the police report was created. He had been in the middle of explaining how to order a copy of the report when he suddenly stopped and said, Are you okay? I said, I’m sorry, I’m really trying not to cry. I asked him to repeat the directions. There was a long pause, and he said, Listen, let me grab this for you and do my best to rush it. He asked for my name and number and said he would call me as soon as he could. It’s important, I said. I need to know. He repeated my number back to me and I heard the click-click of a pen. Okay, he said.

I realized now that I hadn’t gotten his name and had no way of following up with him. I went to the second page of the results pages and methodically opened each link.

The sun was glaring through the window when I heard the front door close a few hours later. I pictured my mom in the produce aisle of the nearest grocery store, gripping the oranges with one palm, shaking open the plastic bag with the other. She wouldn’t know that San Francisco now charged for bags. Only a few cents, but she’d be peeved nonetheless.

Why here? she asked when I told her that Ian and I planned to take the California bar. You always go on about how there’s so much more on the East Coast. You’ve spent nearly three years here already. Aren’t you sick of sitting around and talking about how much you hate tech?

Ian and I had been about to graduate from law school at Stanford, and it was the beginning of summer. After the bar exam, I would be heading to Washington DC for two clerkships, each a year long, but I planned to join Ian after that in San Francisco, where he was going to be an associate at a midsize firm. I hated the idea of Ian and me being apart, but there was no question that I would accept the clerkships. Clerking was the most prestigious job a law school grad could get, and the two judges who had hired me were among the most coveted. When they each called and offered me a position, Ian and I had been in the middle of declaring our intention to be barred in California, and I felt as though they had anointed me through the phone.

My mom leaned her elbows on the rickety table in our law school apartment, something we’d found for forty bucks at a garage sale and fashioned into a kitchen table. Whenever we dropped our heavy textbooks onto it, the legs had shuddered, and Ian and I would joke that even it found various legal subjects tiresome. I’d told my mom months before that we were planning to stay in California, but this was the first time we had actually discussed the fact that I wouldn’t be coming back to Ohio, or moving somewhere closer like New York City. I shrugged. We like it here, I said. My mom shook her head and said, You mean Ian likes it here. No, I said. I don’t mind it. I don’t care all that much where I live.

She knew that this last sentence was meant to hurt her. I’d never considered moving back to the Midwest, and especially not to Beachwood, the suburb of Cleveland where I grew up and where she still lived.

I regretted saying it, but I didn’t apologize. At the time, the only thing I really thought about my mother was that being around her made me feel vaguely resentful, which also made me feel guilty because I was aware of how unfair my resentment was. Earlier that week I’d seen my name, for the first time, next to Ian’s on a legal document: MONTH-TO-MONTH LEASE AGREEMENT. We’d found a small apartment in San Francisco where we planned to study for the bar together after graduation. As soon as we picked up the keys, the world seemed to align for the first time. It felt satisfying, like finally wiping the window free of streaks, or curling the loose tail of a ribbon with a scissor’s blade.

The rental apartment was in Noe Valley, the same neighborhood where we would eventually buy our house a few years later, after I’d paid off my loans and Ian had made partner. Neither of us had lived in San Francisco before, just spent a few Saturday nights in the city while we were in law school. Our first apartment there was inside an older building, where all the floorboards had centimeter-length spaces between them, wide enough so nothing ever looked quite clean. Our front door was new, though: Ian had somehow convinced the landlord to get rid of the mail slot in the door and install a dark gold mailbox in the hallway for us. The landlord had first offered to nail down the slot, but Ian got him to buy an entirely new door, this time in a color we chose. It’s weird when people just stick their hand into your house, Ian had said. There was a half bathroom at the front of the house. It was minuscule, and the toilet was almost always running, but having one made me feel distinctly adult, knowing that someone who came over for dinner wouldn’t have to see our shampoo bottles on the edge of the shower, our toothbrushes on the counter.

And right when I started to feel pride in my adult home, I felt shame, too. This is exactly what you hated about her, I thought. I fell backward into memories of my mother pushing me into etiquette classes at age seven, held at a community center where an old out-of-tune piano sat covered in a black blanket. Throughout elementary school, there were the frilly socks over the patent leather shoes, the glorification of meals that were only steamed fish and vegetables, with plain fruit for dessert. My tender childhood memories are rarer: standing with her in the bathroom, watching her put two fingers into a pot of cold cream then hold her palms together, warming the cream with her hands until it reached the temperature of her body. It smelled like cucumber, and when she wasn’t looking, I would push my finger into the open jar and pull out a dollop that looked like a soft peak of just barely whipped egg whites.

It wasn’t until I was fifteen that I saw my mother as others did. I was sleeping over at a friend’s house, watching a soapy teen drama set in a wealthy New England town. The mother in the show wore a pink suit with pearls—that’s the classic Chanel suit, my friend had said. WASP-y. I asked her what that meant.

It stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, she said. That’s my mom, I said. She’d totally wear something like that. No, she said, sucking popcorn into her teeth. It’s "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant." And you have to be rich to be a WASP, anyway.

I spent that night fidgeting in my sleeping bag. So, my mother wasn’t even a WASP, but something worse. She was someone who aspired to be a WASP. Even though, as I eventually learned, no self-respecting WASP would ever consider her one of their own. A single mom, barely getting by, Taiwanese. After my father died, not long after she found out she was pregnant, she told me she had thought about going back to Taiwan. But they had worked so hard for their student visas, both of them—their names already tinged in awe by their families—that she felt it would be a second tragedy to come back with nothing to show for it but me.

And so when Ian and I got our first place together, in both our names, I felt only the familiar current of resentment work through my blood. I should be able to enjoy this moment, I imagined myself saying to her. I am in a fulfilling and, most important, equal relationship. I am with a man who admires my mind and my career and my ambition.

But when Ian and I went to sleep that night, on a mattress that had just been delivered, I was unable to escape. For all my attempts at distancing myself, I felt I had somehow absorbed her ideas, like osmosis, when I was in the womb. Sometimes I imagined her in labor at the hospital, alone, waiting for a single other family member to finally join her in America: me.

Chapter Three

The front door opened and I heard three footsteps and then a thump of grocery bags hitting the floor. Ellie, my mom called, Wake up. I’m home.

I found her in the kitchen putting away groceries, her back toward me. Her hair was pulled up in a ponytail, one of the few times I had ever seen it not falling past her shoulders. Each time she finished putting the contents of a paper bag inside the fridge, she’d fold the bag into thirds and place it on the kitchen island.

I sat down on a stool by the island. It was made of a dark, hard material and had never been comfortable. I put my palms over my eyes.

How’d you sleep? she asked, glancing back at me.

Horribly.

Barely anything?

I nodded even though her back was turned to me now. She closed the fridge and put her hand on top of the stack of brown bags. Remind me again where the recycling is.

The week before our wedding was the first time she’d come to stay at our new home, which was only a few blocks down from where we’d been renting. Before we had closed on the house, she had called me a few times, always asking the same few questions about the mortgage and the state of our finances. Don’t worry, I remember saying to her, often while leaning back in my office chair. You won’t believe how much Ian makes now that he’s partner.

Of course, it helped that he’d had a windfall. During law school, I went with him to upstate New York to oversee the selling of his childhood home, which had sat unoccupied for a few years after his parents’ deaths. The sale was thrilling to him, in that he would no longer have any law school loans and would have the beginnings of a down payment, even in a city as expensive as San Francisco. It took us almost three hours to drive to his hometown from the nearest airport, and he kept making jokes about how the flight from California was almost as long. By this point, I could tell when he was using humor to deflect from the way he was feeling, and I found his sensitivity endearing. When we got to his town, he spent a long time pointing out his elementary school, the community pool where he learned to swim. Isn’t it getting late? I asked when he drove us to a baseball field where he’d played Little League. Shouldn’t we call it a night and head to your place? He said, Oh God no, we’re not going to stay there tonight. I booked us a hotel.

Now, I pointed my mother to the lower cabinet opposite the sink, where she stowed the brown paper bags before turning her attention